Postcards from the Edge
by binx-349
Summary: It was the nightmare that kept me grounded in the best times, and what pushed me to the brink at the worst. [GS]


A/N: Huge thanks the Marlou for the beta, also to Leslie, Carmen, Robin and anyone else I've whined at about this thing for the past week or so.

This is what comes of taking your inspiration from crappy bleach commercials. Don't do it people.

I could almost feel the finger on the trigger, the pause right before the blast, where all the air seems to rush from the room in a single sucking gust, a vortex of silence, cold, and pain, a sickening reminder of intended fate. It was the nightmare that kept me grounded in the best of times, and what pushed me to the brink at the worst. I must have envisioned this situation a million times in every conceivable way over the years, in every combination under the sun. I'd seen it all, and yet none of that had managed to even vaguely prepare me for living it. Not even close.

His voice was low, almost soothing in the strangest way. Not the kind of man you would imagine drawing a gun on someone. Then again, they never are the ones you expect. I think perhaps they do it on purpose, to shock, to make people suspect the very worst of humanity. I did however think that by now I would have been able to spot them, even in the best of disguises. I didn't notice. He was right there the whole time. We questioned him, picked every square inch of his brain for a clue, for the answer. Neither of us could have ever seen this coming. The search of his house was simply procedural; we had no evidence, no case, and no suspicions. He hadn't even seemed worried when he had agreed to the search, not even a flicker.

The ferocious glint in his eye remained just there, not migrating to his vocal chords, staying detached from every other motion and part of him. The eyes are said to be the windows to the soul, whatever you may be able to disguise in every other part of you comes out there.

He watched us almost hawklike for so long that I thought that he might not even follow through, that we still had a chance. I took the opportunity to take a step towards her. It was so slight I honestly didn't expect him to notice, his attention was focussed so firmly on her face. The way his eyes probed over her like physical fingers on her flesh made me shudder. Her eyes flicked to me as I spoke, dark pupils wide and nothing could veil the fear I saw. I could barely keep the tremor from my voice.

The metallic click of the safety lock cuts of my words. His response still echoes in my head, "You make empty threats Mr Grissom, empty threats". I knew he was right even before he voiced it. There was nothing I could do, nothing. I would never have given him the satisfaction of a response. He smiled triumphantly. A wild grin that seemed to break through any and all restraints placed on it, growing over his features like a virulent weed. Spreading and flowering in moments, smothering anything in its path. He knew, and it was all I could do to suppress the inclination to jump at him. I didn't, I couldn't.

The blast I had anticipated never came. Her name froze on my lips. The silence was broken only by the harsh breathing of another.

That space of hours is like a blank in my mind, a void of open space with nothing to satiate it. Something must have happened. I know that, but the memories are gone, perhaps forever; it comes back in patches, like bits of paint peeling from a shiny surface, slowly revealing a picture beneath that someone has tried to hide from you. Some things are best left forgotten.

Surfacing from the unconsciousness is like running uphill through mud; a slow and murky process, with little reward except the mother of all headaches. It's a deep pounding in my brain that leaves me weak and dizzy and an immediate stinging reminder of our bleak situation. I shifted momentarily; an acute pain radiated from my side causing me to suck in a sharp breath.

The only physical remainder of that nightmare, if I close my eyes tightly enough, is an aching sensation across the pit of my stomach. It hasn't left me since. 

I found myself in a place where light seems to flee from dark, playing an unending game of catch up, where the only end result is to lose. It disappeared over a period of several minutes, plunging the room into a darkness previously unrealised. Sundown, leeches out the daylight, sucks it up like a sponge. Sara's shirt makes up the only visible colour. Even that red is muted by the situation and the seeming sieving of things from my mind.

Her hunched figure drew my eyes and tugged at my heart. Her arms were clenched tightly around her legs, her cheek resting on one knee. When threatened the natural human defence is to curl up, to attempt to become as small as possible in the hope that danger passes without even realising you're there. An automatic reflex designed to aid survival, brought out in moments of extreme stress to combat anything that could be construed as a threat. She was scared.

I whispered her name so many times - unsure of whether she even knew I was there. It hung in the air, never seeming to reach her. I feared about speaking too loud. Eventually she turned her head to me. Tear tracks glowed down her cheeks reflecting the last of the light. 'Sara?' She looked so lost, so alone. She made no response except to blink a few times, ignoring me completely.

The silence was soon broken by her voice. I listened, whispered confessions to the dark, muttered into the stark air without thought. Her murmurs grew to be comforting, an affirmation of her presence although I didn't necessarily understand or follow the subject of them. 'I didn't want this', 'I thought you needed me?', 'don't touch me', 'just let me go home', along with a million other phrases that didn't fit with the one I had identified before.

Her mind had seemed to be coming unstitched at the edges, unravelling like an old jumper. The helplessness caught me like nothing else, watching and having no idea how to help and no way of knowing how to comfort. I was hopelessly lost and without a map to guide me. I'm sure that there isn't a 'Sara Map' available, but if there was I would have bought them out in an instant.

The very state of her was visible in the repetitive clenching of her fingers, the tightness in her muscles and the tension in her posture. So stretched out I could see her splitting.

I was closely tied by my own mind, not counting my body's injuries. Trapped and restrained, bound by mental fetters so tight that to move is like breaking shackles of iron. Biting my lip so hard as to draw blood I eased myself up to lean back against a wall behind me, taking a ragged breath and attempting to straighten the kinks out my spine in the process. The icy cold of the metal against the skin of my back and arms is the least of my problems.

I raise a hand, start to reach out towards her, pulling back at the last moment. Not sure if it will help or hinder. Normally I'm not the kind of man who reaches out, but today is different; today I know I need to. I just can't seem to break the habit when I should do.

I have come to the conclusion that she scares the hell out of me, always has.  
She has a power over my mind that no one else holds. Right then, she was scaring me more than ever before.

We do what we have to do to get us through the day, through a time in life that's not so bright. What I need and what she needs is so intricately entwined that to tease them apart is more difficult than you would ever have dreamed.

The next time I lean in I don't pull back, but rest a palm on her shaking hand wrapping my fingers around the knuckles that were clenched on the material of her jeans. If I held on tight enough, maybe things would suddenly work, it would suddenly all make total sense in the mist of my tangled mind.

I ran a finger up her arm along the dark bruises that circle her wrist, harsh against her pale skin. I winced as she leaned against me heavily and muffled my groan in the hopes she wouldn't notice. I don't want to see her back away again, it hurts.

We seem to sit there, unmoving, for hours. My back is all but numb from cold and loss of blood supply, with Sara pinned against me like this I doubt I could move anyway. I almost didn't want to.

Conducting the little positive energy that was available was a task like none other. I watched her as she seemed to seem to reel in her thoughts, accumulating together everything as if to lock it away in the back of her mind where she can keep avoiding it. Like a child picking up stones on a beach and storing them in their jumper to take home and hide. She was collecting pieces of herself, a safety net in the face of everything that's happened.

The only movement I could see then was the light rise and fall of her chest as she seems to drag herself back into the present. She hadn't looked at me in so long, and it scared me. This wasn't her. Sara was strong, resilient. She defied her past, she got involved but never burnt-out. It was just how it was. Nothing could break her, the more I thought the more I knew. She was more than just fragile. Once I would never have put that label on her, when I first met her in San Francisco, firing questions at me like a pro. When she came to Vegas, fighting for the respect she deserved. Yet somewhere along the way, things had changed, things had happened that wore her down, that pressed her back into a shade of herself. Somehow I found I didn't even know her anymore.

"Grissom?" her whisper had a distinct edge, and exhaustion and fear drove out any sense of relief I may have felt on finally hearing her voice again. I squeezed her hand all the tighter as she turned her head to meet my eyes. "Where are we?" her voice tailed off towards the end, perhaps realising that she didn't really want to know the answer.

She could have asked any number of things, and I don't think I would have been able to form a coherent thought about any of them. That one, I certainly couldn't answer for her. If she wanted reassurance about our situation I was in no position to be giving it. "I'm not sure," I muttered. It was the best I could do. If I kept staring at the wall perhaps I would be able to lie better than if I looked at her. The now blinding pain in my side was a distraction like none other.

She huffed a derisive laugh, "Wow, that's comforting". She simply sounded tired, resigned. All traces of her previous condition seemed to have been erased leaving no trace. It made me wonder how she does it. I compartmentalise, but not like this, not so fast. It's like she switches tracks, straight to another level leaving everything else behind.

She shifted suddenly, gasping a sharp breath muffling it into the sleeve of my shirt. "Sara?" I turned my head swiftly. "Sara, are you okay?" There was only silence. The number of times I had seen her dodge this same question was almost uncountable, and in the end I normally figured that it really wasn't any of my business anyway. Why push her if she didn't want me to know? I would walk away. In this case, I was willing to wait for an answer.

Her only response was a shaky nod. She kept lying, pretending she was fine. Pretty soon lies led to the truth, right? That's all I want, the truth. The lie was just the same as it had always been; as transparent as glass, and permeable to anything she thought I might have to offer. The truth was solid. Something that couldn't evaporate when she tried to touch it, every time she tried to reassure herself that there was really something there.

Seconds became minutes, marching steadily on into hours, without hesitation or apology. The intense claustrophobia and stifling atmosphere heightened the panic that was rising steadily in my throat, leisurely clawing its way up to the surface. After so many years suppression has become so normal that it is almost autonomic. I'd swallow it down, move on and vainly hope that it never came back to haunt me again.

I still see bits of it play over in my head. Everything looks distorted and pale, his face like that of a corpse, looming as if an omen. Luminous flashes of memory amidst gaping holes that leave me feeling empty. The scenario seems to play out in my memory on constant action replay, never showing me what I so need to see. I remember every detail up to and since, and I don't understand how it can be gone so suddenly.

It had started off so much like a normal day, right from the bagel at breakfast, the drive to work where every red light seemed to be against me. I parked in my usual space, the stiff door to the Lab nearly ate my hand again and a pretty average double was pulled. It was all the same, no indication of what would interrupt the normality, of how the day would end. Although honestly, I suppose there never is. Life altering moments usually don't have a warning clause. If they did bad things would never happen, and they do. I see them every day.

I didn't even notice anything was off until I stood up. We were just about to leave. I'd turned away from her for only a few moments, scraping a sample from the skirting board. I was so involved that I didn't even see what was happening. I straightened, rubbing at my back where the dull ache had begun to form at the base of my spine, radiating out through the muscles. It all seemed to progress so quickly that it was over before it had begun. The fear that rippled through my stomach was like nothing I'd felt before, it spread like ice and chilled twice as effectively. My eyes ended up fixed on the gun, the muzzle of which was flush against her cheek, pressing into the skin. I remember thinking it would leave an indentation, a ridiculous thought under the circumstances.

She was strong as ever, well and truly got her licks in. I stood and did nothing while she struggled; couldn't move an inch. A deadly stalemate and one I was not willing to take the risk on. Not worth that risk. 

Retrospection is a depressing thing; to look back and think of all the what-ifs. To know that there might have been something you could have done differently, that might have changed the outcome, altered a future that shouldn't have been in the first place.

I never knew what happened in those hours. I still don't. It's something I decided was better left unexamined. That it will stay somewhat unknown is almost a blessing. 'Ignorance is bliss' after all. If I had chosen to ask I might feel less of the guilt, but it seems a small price to pay. If we don't talk about it, the memories might just leave us both alone. It might stop haunting my nightmares, coming back to ambush me when I'm vulnerable, where there is nothing to stop them taking over. The nightmares seem more authentic to me than the reality does.

It seems so much like a dream now. It's a thought that leaves me altogether more comfortable than I would be if it felt like the truth. As a delusion it can be far more effectively banished to a back corner of the mind. It never happened, so I have no need to deal with it. All better, all gone. 

It would never be that simple, never.


End file.
